This is outrageous - medical paper argues that wanting healthy, undeformed babies should be "queered"

[Sidaway]

So shocked I'm beyond words. I read on Twitter this morning that a paper, in a mainstream medical journal published by Elsevier, says:

"The authors argue that “gendered” pregnancy care is too focused on helping women have healthy babies, and that it might be okay for transmen to continue taking testosterone during pregnancy despite the known health risks to the fetus and effects on its normal development. The desire for “normal fetal outcomes,” according to the authors, is rooted in a problematic desire “to protect their offspring from becoming anything other than ‘normal’” and “reflect historical and ongoing social practices for creating ‘ideal’ and normative bodies."

https://twitter.com/babybeginner/status/1681087794998030337
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/is-there-a-doctor-in-the-house

The queer lobby must really, really hate children.

What did Elsevier think they were doing by publishing this? They should be called out for this very hard.

Exactly.

lots of women of reproductive age take teratogenic medications but their prescribing specialists are incredibly cautious and often prescribe a long-term contraceptive at the same time, so as to minimise the risk of unplanned pregnancy. If the woman wants to try for a baby she has to have a supervised medication change first (eg certain epilepsy medications).

FWIW I do know of some NHS endocrinologists who only prescribe Testosterone to transmen who date men on the same basis - a long term contraceptive must be used in tandem.

It’s completely ludicrous to suggest transmen should be held to a lower standard re: avoidance of foetal harm than other women.
It’s all very well to argue a transman should be able to alter her body via informed consent but as her baby is unable to consent to the associated intrauterine harms that argument becomes irrelevant.

I’ve had a pharmacist refuse to give me antibiotics for an ear infection because I was breastfeeding (and the GP had already checked the reference book and concluded the benefit was greater than the risk)

Feel bad for that gp!
Wow! The mum was 30. And it says he said 'if' mum had a good diet. Maybe she didnt.
the only way for gp to cover for this would be to test womens levels.
if anything it is a failing of both common knowledge and general public health info.
one would hope now women just pop into boots.
also it can sometimes be seen on a scan. The question would be of the mum would have aborted.
there was no need for her to have seen a gp anyway (presumably)
otherwose a low dose constant dose shoukd be reommended from age 13 for women

Please for the love of god someone explain to me how they have managed to turn PCOS into a so-called ‘intersex’ condition? Did some stupid researcher (or one with an agenda) decide to lump PCOS in with DSDs or did the trans lobby come up with it themselves?

Elsevier does not solely publish medical research.

I really recommend reading the full paper. It's both thoughtful and very thought provoking. Please note, sociological research (which this is) does not claim to be medical research.

Sociologists shouldn't be trying to make clever points, playing Devils Advocate. If they wanted to make a point about societies attitudes towards disabled people or pregnant women, there were better ways than this.

Human experimentation on a fetus is illegal. It should be illegal, and anything that serves to undermine that is unethical.

It sounds like the sort of piss -take academic papaer that Peter Boghassian would have produced in order to show up the vacuity and ridiculousness of wokeist academia.

Queer theory really is all about narcissitic self entitlement.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/arts/academic-journals-hoax.html

Why are they discussing medical issues and dismissing tetratogenicity so easily then? They should stay in their lane.

It is thought provoking. But the thoughts provoked in me are more around what sort of idiots are these authors? Where does this rank on the Sally Hines Batshit Crazy Scale (tough call)?

More specifically, why are they so happy to dismiss WPATH’s recommendation on avoiding testosterone in pregnancy, one of the few sensible things to come out of SOC8, “due to lack of evidence” but these same people are all for the rest of SOC8’s recommendations for medicalising children despite an actual lack of evidence?

There is an absolute glut of this kind of guff.

Makes it extremely time consuming to find factual, medical information as first you have to discount paper after paper that looks to be on the subject but is really about ‘normativity’ and ‘inclusion’ and ‘queering’.

From what I've seen of it, it's a mix of the whole 'sex is a spectrum' bullshit promoted by very dubious researchers and a group of 'not like other girls' navel gazers who have realised that non binary identities don't have quite the same cachet anymore so have decided to use their not a DSD condition to identify under the umbrella. It's incredibly insulting to those who do have DSD's.

Verity (the main PCOS charity in the UK) have already had to make statements to make it clear that PCOS is not considered an 'intersex' condition.

It’s part of Stonewall’s campaign strategy. Stonewall are promoting use of the outdated and inaccurate term “intersex” and using it in the same breath as “non binary”.

The reason they are doing this is to:

• create the false impression that there is a third sex;
• make a link in people’s minds between that (false) idea of there being a third sex with the concept of being ‘non-binary’;
• play on the natural sympathy which most people will feel for individuals with a DSD and seek to apply that same sympathy to individuals wanting to be awarded special status and support on the grounds of the fashion choices they make and internal view of themselves;
• argue that single-sex spaces are exclusionary of these Very Special non-binary individuals and therefore all facilities must be “gender neutral” which Stonewall will never be truthful enough to describe as mixed sex.

It’s just another of their “sleight of hand” / “wedge issue” / “small step” tactics in their toolbox.

PCOS affects the ovaries. Which only women have.

The sheer stupidity and offensiveness on this issue is unbelievable.

Sally Hines is one of the authors.

Vile woman. So much for 'be kind'.

The mendacious glomming on to anything that only women have (like PCOS) to present it as an ‘anyone’ thing, no longer a female thing, just shows how they view anything female as a blank canvas to occupy if it suits them.

Would a child whose mother has deliberately taken drugs resulting in abnormality have a case (or the state representing them) against the parent?

I thought that too. My son suffered from that - now sadly passed away

PCOS is an "intersex" condition- I thought I'd heard it all but there's always more, isn't there.

I was diagnosed in my 20s with PCOS. Took metformin (a diabetic drug, not female hormones ) for a while then stopped. Conceived my children without any sort of medical intervention. There is nothing ambiguous about my sex whatsoever.

Man this has wound me up. Such bullshit merchants.

Totally effed up point of view.

We take pains to give birth to healthy children, for their sake, because they have a life beyond being a prop for their parent and deserve the healthiest body that we can naturally give them.

I'd wager the author is healthy and normative - all thanks to their birth mother, why aren't other unborn children allowed the same advantages?

This Is an utterly dark take and ethically bonkers.

oh god. so we go from one extreme of "don't even take painkillers!" to "don't worry, a few fatal defects aren't anything to worry about". WTF

Just your everyday academic.

I’m sorry - anything I could type here seems completely inadequate.

I suspect these authors are able to be so cavalier about ‘queering’ the bodies of children because they have absolutely no clue of the realities of raising a child with special needs and/or life limiting/life threatening conditions.

I'm sorry to hear this @Rosiesmydog

I don't think they're trying to "make a point about societies attitudes towards disabled people or pregnant women". You're imputing a decent motive to them when actually this is anything but.

What they are trying to do is justify women who want to keep taking testosterone when they discover they are pregnant, even though testosterone is a known teratogenic.

In order to do this, they are using the very laudable aims of disability activists and distorting them to provide a beneficent sounding smokescreen for their own sinister, selfish stance.

It is emotional manipulation on the highest level, as are many TRA activist stances.

There's pomo ridiculous bullshit and then there's psycopathy. As a society it's time to not get the two confused.

I'm disabled, by a genetically inherited condition. I will die of it. It is not some rich experience of diversity that could be wished away by others seeing me in a rosy glow of accessible heaven. It's crippling. It's painful. It is quality of life destroying. It's made me unemployable and destroyed my career, it's going to destroy my ability to live independently before much longer. I would not wish this on someone I hated, never mind think of it as a future I wanted for a child of mine. The sheer naive stupidity and egotism of this bullshit has to stop now.

And as always, in every single stupid idea from this critical theory:

• Why should we abandon all boundaries, make this group of society suffer x and stop having any conscience about it while pretending it's a good thing?

• So that T people don't have to hear the word no.

I have PCOS. Which toilet am I supposed to use? 😩